Updated Wine yesterday and Lutris no longer does anything, tried even a fresh install - pressing "Play" holds for a few seconds before reverting back to it again.

Could someone brief me with a few terminal commands to run the scripts you're using to get it going? I have the torrent downloaded again, even the Lutris folder set up, but nothing happens even when trying to open RoRlauncher.exe with Wine.

Disable DXVK from the Lutris configuration. They updated Lutris so DXVK gets enabled by default and if you dont get anything then you probably missing vulkan libraries for your GPU drivers. But anyway this game is broken with DXVK.

I also updated the first post with that info

you can also switch the wine version there to older version, if the newer one doesn't work

Not really. This game isn't GPU heavy anyway and engine cap is 100 FPS so you cant go beyond that, however i feel it reduced all those big framespikes quite a bit, those that happened when you got into the new area.
But thats about it.

Install went okay, but the launcher doesn't appear to be connecting.
There's a barely visible dashed outline where the Patch Notes, etc. should be.
WEB SERVER is red.
LOGIN SERVER is yellow.

I don't know how to fix your specific connection issues, but I highly doubt it's a wine issue. The launcher has graphical glitches sometimes for me, but I've never seen it fail to connect when it would otherwise be fine on Windows.